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Fragments of Lichtenberg

Pierre Senges

Translated by Gregory Flanders

The eighteenth-century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg left behind at the time of his death thousands of fragmentary notes commenting on a dazzling and at the same time puzzling array of subjects. Pierre Senges’s Fragments of Lichtenberg imaginatively and hilariously reconstructs the efforts of scholars across three centuries to piece together Lichtenberg’s disparate notes into a coherent philosophical or artistic statement. What emerges instead from their efforts are a wide variety of conflicting and competing Lichtenbergs – the poet, the physicist, the philosopher, the humorist – and a very funny meditation on the way interpretations and speculation create new histories and new realities.

Bron in 1968, Pierre Senges is the author of fifteen works of fiction and essays, and nearly twenty radio plays. He has won numerous literary prizes, including the Prix SACD for New Radio Talent in 2007.